Parts (aside from the Blu-Ray burner which is on a ship heading here from China).

Mock fitting.

Lapped all the thermal coupling blocks flat (I know, it's not a mirror finish, went up to 2000 grit).

Installed! Arguably the hardest part of the build, used up my entire tube of IC Diamond. Had to scrounge up some Arctic Silver to complete the jobby, no clue why Streacom did not include any thermal paste...

Power and SATA3 cables in place for future 3.5" hard drive expansion. Still waiting on the slim SATA adapter cable to plug the Blu-Ray burner in, allocated a molex connector on the bottom right.

3.5" hard drive mocked in place.

Now for the stress testing portions, sure an i3 doesn't put out that much heat, but the heatsinks still got plenty hot. Ran Prime95 + MSE full antivirus scan for a day just to be safe (partially because I wanted to cure the thermal paste) and found that the temps maxed out at around 70C, which is impressive for a completely fanless case.

Not bad for a consumer SSD.

Some of my opinions after buttoning up the system:

PROS+Looks amazing+Passive cooling system works pretty well+Can fit a surprisingly amount of hardware inside+Solid constructionMINUSES-Too many parts make up the case, introduces flex because there are a lot of screw joints, would be better if the sinks were one piece-Top and bottom panels could be thicker-Finish could be better, but I understand the 'EVO' edition fixes this-Cost!-Unused heatsinks on the left of the case, would be better of the heatpipes were split between the two banks of heatsinks

So far I'm quite satisfied with the system. The SSD definitely speed things up a lot. My boot times were in the 15 second range with the standard installation of Windows 7 before any optimization. It has obviously slowed down a tad bit due to the programs I installed. The HD4000 graphics are amazing and effortless, I do not understand why anyone would pay for a more expensive i5 for HTPC duties (or even i7's) - the i3 is PLENTY.

Very nice. I've been looking at that case myself, albeit more with wistful longing than in any real danger of spending that much money (whilst sober). If I had one, I'd be forced to mod that blue LED to a white one. Blue LEDs are so 2009.

To everyon with a power brick from Streacom/Wesena/Perfect Home Theatre, be careful with the external power brick BTW, mine died in a little under a month. I opened it up and found CRAP soldering, and connections that broke off due to cold solders and whatnot:

A baby could solder better! I will need to reflow the connections as I have to pay to ship it back, which I thought was ridiculous as any reseller should stand behind their product especially if it was an issue a consumer could not foresee. Utter garbage.

Nice build!I love this case, I have the black one. I made some alterations though:- 2x suspended 1TB 2.5" drive (using alu angle brackets screwed to the base and some stretchmagic)- I ordered the streacom/wesena ir kit but it appears it is not 100% MCE compatible and I didn't like it or its remote. I swapped it and installed a receiver for the cir header on my intel motherboard. Now works a treat with MCE/XBMC and my harmony one.

The one bugbear I have is the optical drive mounting. I had all kinds of issues getting the button to work properly (wasn't aligned). Yes I did order the recommended slot loading DVD drive, forget what model it was. I don't really watch many dvd's anyways so have kindof given up on that after about 5 attempts to make it work properly. I simply eject the disc via windows.Glad I didn't go with the streacom power kit though, using a picopsu.

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